I will acro every nym in this room

[publictrans]

I have decided that I hate the abbreviations "FTM" and "MTF". They always kinda confuse me, because they start with the wrong letter. In my brain, FTM unpacks to "Female something something" and MTF unpacks to "Male something something"... which is kind of the opposite of what it's supposed to be. The emphasis is just all wrong

Comments

[every_piece]

I like this.

[shrines]

yeah, true story. although i do say 'ftm' and 'mtf' with my mouth words sometimes.

trans male and female are so much easier though, and that's how we refer to cis males and females too, so, you know. equality and all that.

[jlina]

I'm down! Let's try to make it catch on by getting that labeling scheme to be used by THE BIGGEST TRANS CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD!

[iphisol]

Haha YES

[hotassmess]

trans conference? Is this a place where like......transportation is discussed?

[iphisol]

OMFG Perfect!

[publictrans]

Yeah, that's the big issue I see too. You can't really say "TM-spectrum folks" the way you can "FTM-spectrum folks" (which, come to think of it, is kind of the entire point) (of course, FTM isn't a spectrum, it's a vector along a sex spectrum, but that's a different gripe). But I get the impression that "FTM-spectrum" is kind of a crappy way to refer to nonbinary ID-ed FAAB [ugh] people anyway - precisely because it does imply a vector with a binary end state.

Primarily, I feel like people should be definied by their identity or their transition destination, not necessarily by where they came from. For non-binary folks, it seems to me that GQ fits the bill, at least theoretically. (Of course, the very fact that it is non-binary means that there's an immense number of possible identifications, most of which resent external categorization.) So methinks it's not really my place to make up new terminology for an experience I don't understand.

But yeah, you're right. It's fundamentally binary terminology.